Aakash Gupta@aakashgupta
Gout Gout was at Ipswich Grammar School to play soccer. He had never trained as a sprinter. He was twelve years old, wearing sand shoes, and somebody told him to line up for a race at the school carnival.
The kid next to him was wearing spikes. He had won nationals.
Gout left him in the dust.
His classmate Tyson Walker was in the race too. "Everyone there stopped and watched," Walker recalled. "We had GPS athletics the next week and he broke every record and just didn't stop. He's just kept going faster."
A coach named Di Sheppard saw him run that day. She told him he could be an Olympic medalist. He later said it was the first time anyone had ever told him anything like that. He was twelve. He joined her squad and started training twice a week.
Here is where the story gets strange.
At 14 he ran 10.57 in the 100m, the fastest ever by an Australian under 16. At 15 he broke the national U18 200m record. At 16 he clocked 10.04 in a heat, then 10.17 legal in the final, then woke up the next morning and ran 20.04 in the 200m, breaking Peter Norman's Australian record from the 1968 Olympics. That record had stood for 56 years. Usain Bolt saw the footage, posted a photo, and wrote "He looks like young me."
The Bolt comparison is worth sitting with. Bolt didn't race 100 meters professionally until he was 21. His first professional 100m was 10.03. Gout Gout ran 10.00 flat at 18.
And his coach still only puts him in the gym two days a week. She's managing the fact that his body is still growing. The power phase of his development hasn't started. He is running these times on stride length and raw top-end speed alone.
His parents are Dinka, from South Sudan. They fled to Egypt, then to Australia, two years before he was born. Third of seven children. The family name was misspelled during transliteration from Arabic. It was supposed to be Guot. His father has been trying to change it back because "gout" is a disease name.
The kid kept running.
Brisbane 2032. Home Olympics. He'll be 24, the same age Bolt was when he set the 100m world record in Berlin. Adidas already signed him through that year.
The fastest man in Australian history started in sand shoes at a school carnival. Nobody told him to stop.
